Creative Writing

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. ~Robert Frost

To many people poetry remains trapped and frozen in a block of impenatrable ice. We cannot understand or appreciate it. We come to it cold and we leave it frostbitten. So how do we melt a poem?

“Poetry struck me as an arbitrary and capricious method of avoiding clarity, and where my betters heard lyricism I kept hearing foolishness. If the poem said, “Go, lovely rose!” I found myself thinking, “Scram, Rose. On the double. Take a powder, rose.” ~Jean Kerr, Penny Candy

The post continues at The Common Room, a blog by a homeschooling mother.

Even though we are 1/3 of the way through April, the Two-Year College Association is still accepting poetry in either audio or video formats for their National Poetry Month Celebration. There are some great poems already up.

If you would like to submit your work, Submit Your Poem has all the information you need.

I just submitted mine tonight. I worked pretty hard on the presentation and the webstreaming isn’t as nice as the full quality, but I didn’t think I could email the full quality… I still think it looks good. I really like how it turned out.

Hopefully soon my poem will be up with the others.

NPR is offering a great creative writing opportunity for you or your students:

Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. That, according to the official rules, means 600 words or less. To make things even more interesting, we set up a device for each round to serve as the jumping-off point for the story.

Patchett’s not only picking our winner; she’s also given us the challenge to inspire your stories. For Round Four, your story must include these four words: “plant,” “button,” “trick” and “fly.”

10 Rules for Writing Fiction, part one, begins:

Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long.

There are compendiums of various authors’ 10 rules for writing. So this is more like 100 rules for writing.

10 Rules for Writing Fiction, part two, says:

Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

There is other additional useful advice within this.

I think these are the sorts of things one should think about in a creative writing class.

Eva Lipska has been translated into English by two women, one of whom is a teacher at U of Houston Downtown. At a poetry reading this last weekend the professor read a few poems from Lipska’s new English work The New Century.

In her poem “September 11, 2001″ I especially liked the lines about talking to her dressmaker, who said,
“The world has unraveled
and the sewing machine
laughs caustically.”

I’ve only heard three of the poems from the English compilation work, but I really liked them.

I took notes at this session and transferred them onto my blog. So I guess that means it is retroactively live blogged.

Valerie Reimiers on Satrapi
Read Persepolis
read Embroideries

memoir in graphic format is problematic
“nonfiction graphic novels”
various placements in bookstores
Is it literary/literature?
hybrid (like the Borderland works)

unnecessary to place it outside of literature, even though it is memoir

literature = gives pleasure in multiple readings

Satrapi writes of political climate change

coed education abolished

sent to Europe for safety
accomplishes continuity through the narrator
simplicity of carefully constructed black and white poetry

Shows us several examples.

Reimers also has a handout, called “Displacements and Continuities.”
There is a short direction at the top: “Write two or three sentences about an important displacement or continuity in your own life.”

Then, about halfway down the page, it says:
“Decide how you would display your sentences in comic strip panels. Even if you cannot draw well, choose and sketch out which information you would represent in each box (panel) of your mini graphic memoir. What kinds of graphics would you want to use (black and white, color, stick figures, bold or delicate drawings)? Will you use banners at the top or bottom of panels or the balloons indicating speech (usually indicated by the tip of the balloon pointing to the speaker’s mouth) or thought (usually represented by little bubbles leading to the balloon)? Will you use sound representation besides speech (think of superhero comics)? As with poetry, there are many decisions to make about order, arrangement on the page, discovery of the right word, how to carry emotion and thought with concise expression.”

I wrote:
make a picture of NY grocery store
cans for grocery, white blogs equal people, door locked, OPEN
This is for a paper I am working on. Satrapi’s art could work for this.

The fourth panel shows two stick figures (or real figures, if I could draw) who are walking down the sidewalk towards the door. The view is from inside the door.

This presentation made me decide that I should read graphic novels. I now have 15 in my bookshelf.

Students can get involved with National Novel Writing Month, which started today.

Pedablogue has a good post on the topic

Deborah Phelps, originally from Baltimore, MD now at Sam Houston State
“home of death row in Texas”
academic life

I took notes at this session and transferred them onto my blog. So I guess that means it is retroactively live blogged.

ask her if she has applied to CCTE, TCEA

history of Dime Box:
Original Dime Box- real ghost town where something bad happened- though the marker does not say why or what

poignant juxtaposition of Hector and the registrar

excellent description of dead stars

rainbow spill of plastic rosaries

Jacket Magazine publishes poems.

writes in sequences, poems can’t live alone anymore than we can

Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas

“timed occupancies” for office
“My life has been a series of timed occupancies but someone forgot to wind the clock and so I stay within”

sirens slam [me awake] my sleep

potential violence represented is violence

This session brought my poetry to the top. I wrote two sets of great lines while I was listening to her.

Idea: write poem series related to conference attendance—negative spaces in Donatello (last conf)

Gross National Happiness
“an inner menagerie”

Lana Mott Wiggins
Plainview Press publishes her poetry
Southwest Review

laugh- ee- ette- Lafayette

“a vampire in blue jeans and sunshine”

“cling to tender omens”

What does secretary do at SCMLA?

water dragon, ancient and agnostic ark
beautiful articulate snapshots

“vulgar is synonymous with freedom”

she has a lot of “on my back” imagery

“lovely genuine person” – poem about Wm Hughes, editor of Gothic Studies

My idea: Meant & Heard. Hi, how are you? kiss my baby. Have you gotten a job?

Poetry for Community Colleges from Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article on the sixteenth poet laureate.

She was a CC adjunct for decades.

Of course, for a community college instructor, herself a community college graduate, to be the U.S. Poet Laureate at all — well, that’s no small thing in itself. “I’m doing the project without having to do anything,” Ryan laughs, “just by shouting from the rooftops, ‘I spent my life teaching community college, I graduated from one, and I think they’re great!’”